Poverty Surrounds Black Middle Class

Upscale Neighborhood Virtually An Island

Growing up amid the tenements of Bronzeville a half-century ago, Cindy Green was conscious that a few blocks from her South Side home on 46th Street there was an imaginary line she dare not cross.

As a "Negro," if she ventured west of State Street, she would find herself confronted by white street toughs determined to maintain the lines of racial segregation that then divided Chicago's neighborhoods.

Today, she lives in West Chesterfield, a Far South Side suburban-looking community, where African-American professionals live in gracious homes set back on broad lawns. Yet she is still cautious of crossing a line, just two blocks west.

Ironically, Green's anxieties are now focused on the black street toughs of Princeton Park, an area of public housing and economic decline where poverty regularly breeds violence. Recently John Shaw, the son of a Chicago alderman, was gunned down there during a street-corner dice game.

"The young ones," said Green, 69, "seemed to tear the neighborhood down a bit at a time."

Her life's journey illustrates an incongruity shared by the vast majority of Chicago's black middle-class residents: Their economic status has not separated them from the stresses of living in close proximity to the city's poorest, most economically distressed and highest-crime neighborhoods.

That experience runs counter to a rule of thumb of American social advancement: Income and status buy security and peace of mind.

The paradox of Chicago's black middle class has no single cause. In part, it can be ascribed to the preference of many African-Americans to live among people of the same race. But that preference exists in a larger context, shaped by Chicago's long history of racial segregation and conflict.

A computer analysis of 1990 U.S. Census Bureau data by the Tribune found that 86 percent of black middle-class households with incomes of $35,000 or more were located in predominantly black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of the city.

About 79 percent of middle-class households in black middle-class census tracts were within four blocks of tracts where at least a third of the residents lived in poverty. A census tract typically has about 1,500 households and would be classified as middle class if at least 500 of those households fit that economic profile.

Typically, they lived in islands of middle-class prosperity that break up sweeping landscapes of crime and poverty. Those areas are more vulnerable to violence and physical decay, and lack the entertainment and shopping opportunities that middle-class people expect.

By contrast, only 36 percent of households in white middle-class census tracts are within four blocks of high-poverty areas.

In neighborhoods like Chatham, South Shore, Austin and Roseland, prosperous black families congregate in enclaves where the middle-class way of life ends abruptly at borders marked by social disorder. It requires that residents put forth considerable community involvement and energy to keep the violence and crime from lapping over into their relatively quiet neighborhoods.

To a certain degree, many city dwellers--regardless of where they reside--live with a measure of insecurity. And there are predominantly white middle-class communities, particularly along the lakeshore, that also collide with poverty and violence. Community groups in Edgewater and Rogers Park find themselves preoccupied with issues of crime and safety.

But those are the exceptions.

On Chicago's predominantly white Northwest Side, pockets of poverty are separated by spacious areas where the middle-class life predominates. On the Southwest Side, the black middle class acts as a buffer between poverty zones and white neighborhoods.

Those demographic patterns have not changed all that dramatically even though many middle-class blacks have moved in recent years to mostly white neighborhoods and suburbs. In 1990, two-thirds of all black middle-class families in the region making $35,000 lived in Chicago. At the same time, the percentage of blacks living in predominantly white city neighborhoods had inched up only slightly in a decade, from 9 percent to 10.4 percent.

Many blacks value the ethnic ties and cultural pride of living in mostly black communities. That a significant fraction of black middle-class residents would choose to live closer to dangerous, black neighborhoods than to safer, white neighborhoods helps explain why Chicago ranks as America's third most segregated city, according to a study published in the February issue of Population Today. Chicago, which saw its "index of dissimilarity" improve only slightly between 1980 and 1990, ranks first among cities with black populations under 50 percent.

But the reality is that black middle-class city residents who desire--as do most whites--to live in a neighborhood with a significant presence of people who share their race and economic status have virtually no choice except to live next door to some of the city's toughest neighborhoods.